As predicted last week, Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos has become the scapegoat for Melbourne’s hotel quarantine disaster.
Mikakos resigned over the weekend after Premier Daniel Andrews told the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry on Friday that she was the minister responsible.
However, Mikakos made sure to throw some shade at the Premier in her resignation letter:
To be sure, Jenny Mikakos needs to go. But so does the Premier and several other senior public servants.
If there is one thing the Hotel Quarantine Inquiry has proven it is that Daniel Andrews’ Government is an incompetent, arse covering rabble.
After weeks of contradictory evidence and obfuscation, we still do not know who made the decision to contract out management of the Hotel Quarantine system to untrained private security instead of the Victorian Police (with supplementary support from the Australian Defence Force and private security). Nor do we know why these private security guards did not receive training in infection control or the use of PPE.
Instead, we’ve witnessed the entire Victorian public service and ministers, including Premier Daniel Andrews, display collective amnesia. Nobody, not even the Premier or the secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, knew what was going on. Everyone was responsible but nobody was responsible.
Victorians deserve answers as to why they alone have been locked down for months, more than 700 people have died, and many business will fail. This is the biggest public health and economic failure in the state’s history. We did our part and the government failed us.
With Jenny Mikakos clearly bitter about being thrown under the bus, hopefully she will leak insider information on the failed system.
It’s time for Mikakos to spill the beans so that everybody complicit in this debacle can be brought to account. She must not be the sole casualty.
